Tag Archive for ‘Thinking’

When you coach you have to take in feedback and make decisions affecting other people in real time. You say one thing in the wrong tone and your team is turned off. Trust is lost. You have to be extremely careful in how you treat them at first, once you have trust though, it’s much easier to get them to buy-in to your system.

When you manage people in a business situation it’s very similar to a sports game with some obvious differences. The decisions you make as a manager will affect how your staff (team) view you in the future. If you’re a demanding asshole most of the time, your staff doesn’t have many reason to stick their neck out for you or really do the right thing for the company.

When you’re coaching you don’t have weeks to get things done, you have minutes. Generally you coach youth or kids much younger than you, who are less mature than you. You’re forced to abide by the nobler motive, you can’t argue, name call or act childish under any circumstance for fear of losing the trust of the team.

You see managers all the time who’ve lost the trust of their team. Continue Reading

RFP=Request For Proposal. When a public institution needs to contract a company to do a job they aren’t capable of themselves, they send out a Request For Proposal (RFP). The RFP outlines what needs to be done, what tools should be used and some contain a whole lot more. A RFP is basically the project outline for any company that wants to bid on the project. Just like the recycling service in Regina, the City put out an RFP and Emterra won it.

When it comes to RFP’s the cheapest company usually wins. In business, simply going with the cheapest solution is rarely a good idea for your business.

Case in point: City of Regina hasn’t been recycling glass food containers

Turns out the “recycling” company (Emterra) the city hired doesn’t recycle glass. Doesn’t recycle glass?!? What do you mean? Isn’t that a major portion of what we recycle?
When the city put the RFP out about recycling pickup, Emterra responded (conveniently leaving the glass part out) and quoted a cheaper price to do the job.

The city went with the cheaper option, without reading the fine print.

RFP’s suck. It’s a race to the bottom. It’s undercutting everyone else to get a job, that’s not right nor is it sustainable. Continue Reading

If you’re not selling as much as you think you should be, or your business isn’t doing as good as it should be, stop trying to tell more people about yourself. Stop trying to yell louder than everyone else, stop trying to make more commercials about yourself. No one cares about your business.

Your business isn’t growing, not because people don’t know about your company, your business isn’t growing because you’re not willing to sacrifice what really matters to make your organization what it could be.

If you think all you need to do is tell more people about what you’re doing you’re missing the point. If you have to tell people about what you’re selling it’s not going to scale and you aren’t going to experience the growth you want. If you can change your product or service to make it SO incredibly valuable that other people want to share it without you there, you’ve done it.

The new marketing is changing your service offering based on the feedback received from customers and employees to cater to them more effectively over time.

When you blame someone else for something, no matter what it is, you’re protecting yourself from being wrong or at fault.

When you say you’re sorry and take ownership of the situation, the common misconception is that it makes you look weak or powerless. When actually, saying you’re sorry humanizes you and makes you more likeable.

It’s easy to blame others, it’s hard to blame ourselves.

Understanding this is imperative to you making it in this world. It’s a scary place out there and you need to have thick skin if you want to make it. You have to own up to your mistakes. Take responsibility for when things go wrong, don’t point out where others messed up, shut up and fix it yourself. If you get the reputation as the person who takes responsibility, who gets things done, and isn’t afraid of being wrong, you’re grooming yourself to be a leader.

When you blame others for something, it gives you nothing to do about it. Once you blame yourself, you now have something to work on. In the book Bounce it talks about how world class athletes sometimes feel lost when they win, because they have nothing they need to work on. Continue Reading

I had an enlightening conversation with my sister the other day. She works for a company in Calgary. She really understands the industry (realizing this after many probing questions of course) she’s worked her way up to a point where she’s quite valuable in the company, and she still doesn’t know how smart she is.

She isn’t lazy, hates being board, and understands that a stressful, hectic, growing company is much better to be working for than a stale, easy to do job, at a company going no where. The way she thinks is simply refreshing. A great person to have on the team. She truly wants to see her company grow and has a pretty good handle on how to go about doing that.

The best part? She doesn’t have a University degree. Nor do I think she needs one, I think she’s brilliant.

School was never her thing, so she couldn’t pay attention in class and learn, just like many kids back in the day and even more so today. She probably would be diagnosed with a mild version of attention deficit hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But she’s so intelligent in how she thinks. She understands how actions affect other people, she’s self-aware, and really has the companies best interests in mind. Continue Reading

From Mitch Joel’s new book CTRL ALT DELETE he uses this quote from Seth Godin. I love it. Being more average isn’t going to get you anywhere. Being like everyone else won’t work. You must be different.

“You don’t win by being more average than other people in your industry. You don’t win by being more compliant than your fellow co-workers. Being more obedient at what you do every day is not going to make you more indispensable. What makes someone indispensable is that they do something that other people can’t do.We go to work every day trying to not do that. We go to work trying to be just like everyone else, because that feels safe. In today’s economy, and for the foreseeable future, that’s the riskiest thing we can do.”

For more quotes check out this post here:

17 Lessons (Quotes) on Strategy, Leadership, and Advertising
Best Business & Marketing Quotes of 2012
11 Facts You Need To Know About Your Brain